


Lagniappe

by TheLastGoodGoldfish



Category: Veronica Mars (Movie 2014), Veronica Mars (TV), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, domestic crime solving fluff, life's too short for your otp not to be happy and in love, post-MKAT
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-04-22 06:28:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14302833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLastGoodGoldfish/pseuds/TheLastGoodGoldfish
Summary: Logan and Veronica have date night.





	Lagniappe

“It’s not our anniversary.”

“It's— _arguably_ our anniversary.”

“No.”

“Yes. _Arguably_ yes.”

Logan rolls his eyes but holds the door for Veronica, who retaliates by batting her lashes at him as she walks ahead into the restaurant. It’s one of his girlfriend’s many talents, that she can make any word, gesture, or facial expression sarcastic.

She’s pleasant enough when he catches up to her at the greeter’s stand, however; she takes his hand and coos to the girl at the podium, “Hi. Reservation for ‘Echolls?” (Which is red flag number twelve, honestly.)

The hostess—a kid, can’t be more than nineteen, wearing head-to-toe black, with a beige crisscross tie that matches the restaurant’s blandly sophisticated décor—scans the tablet in front of her, then frowns. “Echolls for two? We have you down for seven-thirty...”

—Meaning they’re thirty-six minutes early.

Veronica ignores the face that Logan makes and says, “ _What_? That’s _so_ stupid of me, I thought I said seven!” The kid begins to apologize, but Veronica waves her off. “It’s probably my fault.” She leans against Logan’s arm and, with a smile usually reserved for marks, says to the girl, “Tonight’s our anniversary.”

“It’s not,” says Logan.

“It is. He’s wrong. We can wait at the bar?” Veronica barely waits for an answer before she leads the way across the crowded floor of Neptune’s premier _eclectic world-inspired gourmet dining experience_ —confusingly named “Whispr.” (Red flags two-through-four contained there, since Veronica, when willing to spend exorbitant amounts of money on a meal, trends toward classy places with well-established kitchens, and she’s historically disdainful of anything named after a misspelled verb.)

“Hate to break it to you, Cupcake, but you're a few months late,” says Logan, when they’re seated at the bar and supplied with drinks. “Our anniversary's in January.”

“We got together in January,” Veronica corrects, glancing into the mirror over the bar, “But that’s not our anniversary.”

“I think one of us has a fundamental misunderstanding of how ‘anniversaries’ work.”

“Well it’s not me.” She spins to face him, kicks one leg to cross over the other. She’s in a black dress, leather jacket, and wedge heels, befitting their reservation and whatever occasion this is. _Not_ their anniversary... two weeks out from her birthday, too. It's date night, supposedly, though Logan has his doubts.

She sets her phone on the bar, then rests her chin in her palm and sips white wine, surveying their fellow patrons: older affluent millennials and middle-aged tourists, mostly. There’s a faint, tedious jazzy melody emanating from an unidentified sound system.

“None of our anniversaries are in August,” Logan maintains, then runs through the list just to be sure: he clocks an April, a June, and two Januarys... arguably a May, depending on whether false murder accusations are grounds for restarting the clock, but nothing in August. “Was I even back from deployment this time last year?”

“ _There_ it is.” Veronica jabs one wine-red fingernail at him, then scoops up her glass again. “You came back exactly one year ago yesterday, meaning that you didn’t actually call me your girlfriend until one year ago today. Hence...” She gestures, wide and meaningless, “Our anniversary.”

Logan shakes his head. “No.”

“...Before that, I was just another girl in another town, left alone to pine and dream and hum along to Bobby Darin, not knowing if you’d find your way back to me...” She sighs wistfully, and Logan rolls his eyes again.

“Calm down, Penelope, you had my car: _clearly_ I was coming back.”

“...Only memories to keep me warm on those cold, lonely nights...”

“Are you finished?” asks Logan, and Veronica laughs. Sips her drink and continues to surveil the room through the mirror along the bar. “I can’t speak for you,” he continues, “but _I_ spent those six months under the impression that we were together. If I was mistaken, I’m very interested in what you got up to all that time.”

Veronica pauses long enough to register her error, then recovers. “Um— _pining_? I _just_ said that.”

“Uh-huh, sure. Hot blonde all by herself in Neptune...”

“Living with my _Dad.”_

“...All those pretty boys with fake tans, _just_ your type...”

“Hey now, you know I only like pretty boys with _real_ tans.” She leans over and fusses with the collar on Logan’s shirt, then rests her palm on his chest. “What exactly are you implying, Lieutenant?”

“Nothing, except that while I was drifting out in the ocean, dreaming only of you...” (She openly laughs at that), “...You were back here, living it up...”

“Solving _murders_.”

“Enjoying the single life, while I wasted away on a tin can...”

“I’ve seen movies too, y’know,” interrupts Veronica, releasing his shirt with a gentle shove, before checking her phone. “I know what you hot shots get up to. _Girls in every port._ And you have the nerve to quest...” She falters, momentarily distracted by something over Logan’s shoulder before she refocuses and clears her throat, “...question _my_ virtue.”

At which point, Logan decides it’s time to end the charade. He reaches over, grips the bottom of Veronica’s barstool, and drags the seat right up close to him. He doesn’t allow himself to be distracted by the way her eyes flicker from his eyes to his lips. “Okay, what are we doing here?” he asks.

“What d’you mean?”

“I mean why are we here?” He waves to implicate the restaurant, but Veronica only frowns.

“Um—date night? It’s been on the calendar for weeks.”

“Yeah, but _here_?”

“What? It has four stars on Yelp.”

Logan sighs, because apparently she’s going to make him show his work. “You’ve never in your life mixed up the time for a reservation.”

“Maybe they wrote it down wrong.”

“You called in under _Echolls_ , so you didn’t want to advertise that there’s a Mars on the books for tonight. You picked a place with a stupid name, that has _ten_ kinds of vodka on the menu and only _three_ appetizers, one of which is just green beans. We drove your inconspicuous car, and you’re trying to distract me with banter that requires that I remember dates. So—what’s up? This place laundering money, or is it just a good old fashioned cheating spouse scenario?”

Veronica stares at him for several seconds, genuinely surprised, Logan thinks, because she skips all of her usual deflections. Just blinks mutely at him for a long moment, then announces out-of-the-blue, “I love you.”

And it’s not that Logan doesn’t _know_ that Veronica loves him—they _live_ together, they adopted a _dog_ together—but unsolicited verbalizations of emotion aren’t really her thing, and for a moment he’s torn between the reactive buzz he gets hearing her say it and the suspicion that she’s trying to distract him again. But then she shakes off whatever momentary compulsion overtook her and relaxes with a soft exhale, “Corner booth at your eight o’clock... the Casey Affleck type with the gold chain? That’s Preston Addison. His family’s organized crime in Los Angeles. Preston’s had some _facilities_ here in Neptune since the last sheriff’s administration, and some of Langdon’s deputies are still on the take. I needed to see who shows up to kiss the ring tonight.”

Logan sighs, because of course, all that tracks. “You couldn’t just tell me that?”

Veronica pouts and shrugs, but admits, “I didn’t want to cancel date night again. And I wanted _credit_ for not cancelling date night.”

“Oh yeah, you’re definitely not getting that now.”

She scrunches her nose, but doesn’t contest the ruling. Logan twists on his seat, scopes out her target—a Ray Liotta wannabe in metallic Armani, slurping an IPA beside some underdressed hipster. “That’s the owner at the table with him,” Veronica answers the unasked question.

Logan turns back to her. “What if they seat us on the other side of the restaurant?”

“I’ll take lots of bathroom trips?”

“Want me to get us a table in that section?”

She considers the offer. “But not _too_ close... in case there are familiar faces....”

“That spot by the window?”

“That’ll work.”

Logan slides off the stool. “I’ll say I need our _special table_ to make up for forgetting our anniversary.”

Veronica tilts forward, pecks him on the lips. Stays like that, face lifted toward him, wearing her sweetest, widest Veronica smile. “It’s not our anniversary,” she finally admits.

“It’s not,” he agrees.

He kisses her again, savors her warmth and her softness and wonders briefly what it’ll be like to have a real anniversary with her—not from the other side of the planet, but at home, to have that thing between them. Something special and normal and theirs. He thinks it’ll be nice, that he’ll buy her something great, but to be honest, it’s the apartment and the dog and the leather jacket on _this-so-doesn’t-qualify-as_ Date Night that he lives for.

“I should be on your payroll at this point,” he says.

“I’ll talk to HR," she replies. 

And he turns to go bribe the hostess.


End file.
